A kitchen’s most worn tool may be absent from every photograph of the finished meal.

The most-used tool in a kitchen is rarely in the photograph. The worn knife, the battered pan, the ugly spoon that does everything are absent from the image of the finished dish, which shows the results and the attractive props. What actually did the work is not what gets pictured.

Assume this about any depiction of accomplishment. The tools, habits, and unglamorous routines that produce a result are almost never the ones featured in the account of it. If you want to learn how something is really done, ask what someone uses every day rather than what they recommend, since those two answers are frequently different.